Better bike lanes are the issue - not 'dooring'

Dooring is not the real issue - better bike lanes are needed for the commuting cyclist.

ABC News: Kathleen Dyett

The fact the number of cyclists seriously injured or killed is climbing is a sign of one thing: our infrastructure is still not good enough. The present debate over dooring is a distraction, writes Doug Hendrie.

I began cycling in 2004 when I was a poor student. It was dangerous, sure, but cycling is the fastest, cheapest point-to-point form of transport in Melbourne. I own a car now, but that's for transporting the baby or groceries.

I hate driving, with a passion. Driving brings out the worst in people - cars promise freedom and deliver entrapment.

Melbourne was once a dream for cyclists - flat, long, wide roads, with plenty of paths along rivers and creeks.

In the late 19th century, the whole of Australia was gripped by a cycling craze, immortalised in Banjo Paterson's Mulga Bill's Bicycle: "'Twas Mulga Bill, from Eaglehawk, that caught the cycling craze; He turned away the good old horse that served him many days."

Many poor migrants bought bikes and cycled to the goldfields. During the first half of the 20th century, workers in Melbourne hopped on their bikes each morning to commute to their office, shop or factory. But all that was before the rise of the car and its offspring: low density, far-off suburbs, made possible only by petrol and speed.

Now, cycling can be deadly, with roads dominated by cars. I have a friend who broke her vertebrae and was lucky to escape paralysis, and others with broken bones. In my time riding, I've been forced off the road by a truck, cut off by four-wheel drives, and told to get off the road.

These things don't exactly happen to trams and buses, those other slowcoaches of Melbourne's roads. No - drivers reserve a particular savagery for cyclists. And that's a sign of exactly one thing: inadequate infrastructure.

We shouldn't need to be taught how to coexist in the same scarce space. Drivers and cyclists should be kept apart. The present debate over how to minimise "dooring" is a fig leaf.

Dooring is not a legal problem. You cannot legislate it away. Designing bike paths so riders are channelled between moving cars and parked cars is lethal. All it takes is one daydreaming driver to fling open the door and you're gone. That's what happened to Victoria's first victim of dooring fatality, the young uni student James Cross. The unnamed female cyclist knocked from her bike on Collins St by taxi passengers this week was lucky. By recording it on her helmet cam and posting it on YouTube, she made invisible aggression visible.

This year, there are to be new anti-dooring lanes trialled on Glenferrie Road, Hawthorn, where Cross died in 2010. But these lanes are still not safe. The vulnerable cyclist must still pass between two rows of cars. While not quite European in terms of safety, the bike lanes along much of Swanston St, La Trobe St and Albert St in East Melbourne are the best we've got - because they turn parked cars into a safety barrier against traffic, not into unpredictable weapons. These are the lanes we need: running next to the footpath, separated from traffic.

But why? Why should car drivers lose valuable space to upstarts on bikes? I can give you any number of reasons. Between, say, 6am and 8pm and within a 10km radius of the CBD, I've found that cycling is faster than driving.

The average speed of drivers across in the entire road network in Melbourne in the mornings is now just 35 km/h - and that includes freeways. You can comfortably commute by bike, wind in your hair, getting fit - faster than most cars crawling along 60km/h roads in peak hour.

Add to that free parking, no petrol costs, and it's a wonder those of us who are deskbound still commute by car. Plus, cycling fends off death-by-desk - Dutch research shows switching from car to bike adds between three and 14 months of life (and that takes into account car-induced injuries).

Well, perhaps it's not so surprising. Women are still underrepresented in the great cycling growth spurt, because they have more concern for their own safety than many men. Testosterone is a hell of a drug. But if cycling was safer, more women would ride. And not just women, but children, too, might once again be trusted to ride themselves home from school, rather than sitting passively in the back of a 4WD.

Imagine minimising those years of Mum's Taxi Service and letting children ride. And as for the elderly, who are forced out of their cars at a certain age and thus lose their independence - well, if this was Japan or northern Europe, they'd be riding everywhere, adding years to their lives and doing wonders for their mental health.

It is curious to think that the danger of cars perversely forces us to stay in our own vehicles - as a shield against the other tons of metal roaring past. To break this vicious circle, we need to make cycling normalised and safe, just as it was prior to the advent of the car. For that, we need great bike lanes. Let's make Melbourne a marvel for cyclists again, just as it was before.

Doug Hendrie is a writer from Melbourne and is the author of AmalgaNations: How Globalisation is Good. View his full profile here.